“I’m sorry,” I whispered.
“Don’t be.” He lunged forward into my space again but not so close that the busybodies in the congregation would titter about it. “Doesn’t it feel good to be mean?”
“It shouldn’t matter if it feels good or not. Meanness is not something to aspire to,” I preached.
He rolled his eyes. “You’re so boring, I’m surprised you don’t put yourself to sleep with talk like that.” Suddenly, my hands were in his. “Look, let me help you here. You’re a seventeen-year-old girl with absolutely no life experience and you could die soon. Doesn’t that scare the pants off you?”
“You wish,” I muttered darkly before I could censor myself.
His eyes caught fire with humor and I realized just how pretty he was. “There, doesn’t that feel good? Saying what you really think.”
I swallowed because it did.
Triumphantly, he grinned into my face. “Listen, you can think about it, yeah? I’m not asking you to do a line a coke or anything. I’m just urging you to live a little while you got the chance.”
“Why do you care?” I asked again, this time softly because what he said was under my skin.
“I care because I’ve got half the crap you’ve got to deal with and I hate it.” He indicated his mother, who was still gabbing away with my own. My parents were King and Queen of Entrance society and Mamie Ross was firmly on the fringe despite years of trying to be otherwise. I couldn’t count the number of times I’d seen Reece dragged to the same boring events I was forced to attend.
“I’ll think about it,” I whispered, afraid to even have the words in the air.
The rebellion that was churning hot and slow under my skin had always been just a feeling, a rumbling heat that growled sometimes but never erupted into words or actions. I felt the release of my promise to Reece, felt the crack in the shell of my hardened exterior. It was both ominous and entirely beautiful.
I hadn’t felt so free since Zeus had stopped writing to me.
So, when my mother returned to my side and excused us by saying that we had an important meeting to get to instead of just saying that she had to take me to the Youth Cancer Support Group in Vancouver, I decided to dip my toe in independence.
“I’ll drive myself,” I said, firmly.
Mum hesitated as we crossed the parking lot, surprised by the iron in my voice. She’d molded me to be her ideal child and her ideal child was supposed to be a pushover.
“You’re so busy with all your charity work and there’s the dinner with the Anholt’s tonight so you have to make sure Chef isn’t serving anything with dairy because of Mrs. Anholt’s lactose intolerance… You have so much on your plate and I can easily drive myself down to Vancouver.”
I waited, holding my breath, for my mother’s response.
She took her time thinking about it and, by the time she answered, I was probably purple in the face. “Fine, but be home by dinner.”
“Will do,” I said behind a curtain of hair so that she wouldn’t see my enormous smile.
It was such a little thing, driving myself an hour both ways to Vancouver, but it felt like a massive triumph because my mother dictated almost every aspect of my life and I spent most of the time with her when I wasn’t in school.
“Use the slow lane and watch out for those idiot motorcyclists who think that road rules do not apply to them,” Mum said as she ducked into her sleek black BMW.
“Of course,” I said.
I watched her pull out of the parking lot before making my way over to the silver Mazda hatchback I’d named Optimus Prime. It wasn’t anything to write home about, but it was a zippy little machine and it was my very own. I absolutely adored it.
I was pulling open the door when I felt him behind me. I knew it was Reece before he said, “So, where are we going now that you got rid of mommy dearest?”
“The Youth Cancer Support Group in Vancouver,” I deadpanned, turning my head just slightly so that I could watch his expression fall out of the corner of my eye.
Strangely, he didn’t look disappointed. “Cool, let’s hit it.”
I watched him round my car and open the passenger door. “You’re actually going to go with me to group?”
He crossed his forearms over the roof of the car and leaned toward me. “If that’s where you want to go.”
I pursed my lips. I hated the support group. It was utterly depressing, especially given that of the nine kids in it, four were terminal and three had fought the good fight more than once to get to remission only to slide back into its clutches years later. Everyone there tried hard to be open and optimistic but the second came hard and struck a discordant note. They got something from the morbid camaraderie the group provided for them but I didn’t.